In the midst of a historic, nationwide uprising following the police lynching of George Floyd, and after a weekend of outsize police aggression against protests across the country, the NYPD suddenly found itself on its knees. On Sunday, Deputy Inspector Vincent Tavalaro and several other officers were pictured taking a knee with protesters in Queens. Elected officials across the city and state followed suit with streams of public statements and social media salvos condemning the brutality.

But the posturing and rhetoric of police and elected officials in New York stands in stark contrast to their actions. There is a through-line that connects police brutality to the lack of political will to hold officers accountable and the elected officials who seek to avoid doing the hard things required to protect their black and brown constituents from police terror.

In the wake of George Floyd’s killing, a number of reforms have been put forward: The NAACP has called on Minneapolis to ban police from using the type of restraint that was used to kill Floyd; a Colorado bill would ban choke holds and require all police to wear body cameras; a bipartisan group of senators is pushing to end the military-to-police pipeline that has funneled military-grade equipment to departments across the country; and politicians from the local to the national level are calling to defund or radically transform police departments. In New York, our organization, the Working Families Party, is fighting to repeal 50-a—a law that protects police misconduct records from public view. But none of this stands a chance if politicians continue to do what they’ve done for decades: issue statements about police violence but kill any legislation that would threaten the status quo.

Last week alone, numerous videos went viral of outrageous actions from police officers directed at protesters in New York City. On Friday, an officer was filmed shoving a woman so hard she fell to the ground and hit her head. Social media reports the woman suffered a seizure as a result and required medical attention. And on Saturday, in an action that could have had fatal consequences, two NYPD SUVs plowed into a group of protesters. As troubling as these events are, they are not aberrations. Brutality, militarism, and over-policing are standard operating procedures for a police department whose massive budget was permitted (by a Democratic mayor and Democrat-controlled City Council) to surpass those of the Departments of Health, Homeless Services, Housing Preservation and Development, and Youth and Community Development.

The inconvenient truth for kneeling NYPD officers and outraged elected officials is this: Condemning an egregious and barbaric murder somewhere else is far easier than finding the political will to actually enact change in your own backyard. When it comes to addressing police violence and accountability, city and state elected officials have not only fallen down on the job; they’ve directly fed the beast of over-policing and mass incarceration, putting black and brown New Yorkers directly in harm’s way.

In 2019, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s MTA decided to crack down on fare evasion, hiring 500 additional officers to patrol the subway, at a cost of $249 million per year. As The New Republic reported, the predictable results of the surge in aggressively tracking people who avoided the $2.75 fare were “reports of riders—particularly black riders—being tackled and tased over the cost of a subway ride.”

Before the uprising, 2020 brought more of the same. January kicked off with elected officials and other bad actors leading a propaganda campaign to roll back historic bail reform legislation, which eliminated cash bail for most misdemeanors and nonviolent felony charges. The rollback, championed by both Governor Cuomo and NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio, will see more New Yorkers stuck in jail for pretrial detention while there are few signs of the Covid-19 pandemic slowing down.

While the coronavirus tore through New York’s prisons, black and brown New Yorkers on the outside weren’t spared from the twin dragons of racist policing practices and the pandemic. Thirty-five of the 40 people arrested in May on social distancing violations were black. One confrontation, captured on camera, saw an officer use a stun gun to arrest a man.

The response of Mayor de Blasio, who famously ran against stop-and-frisk in his first mayoral bid, has been particularly disappointing. Saturday evening, he offered a defense of the officers who used their SUVs to simulate a monster truck rally by driving into a group of protesters. De Blasio went out of his way to reach into the minds of the officers behind the wheel, essentially telling the public the officers had no choice because the potentially fatal encounter “was created by a group of protesters blocking and surrounding a police vehicle.” The mayor lauded the department’s restraint.

He has since attempted to walk back this apologism for NYPD violence, but de Blasio’s tepid words come in stark contrast to his tweets following the horrific lynching of George Floyd. “This nation has devalued the lives of Black men for centuries,” de Blasio tweeted on May 28. “It has to end. And it will only end when there are consequences for those who do wrong. These officers need to be charged immediately.”

The mayor’s rhetoric is out of touch with the reality in his own city: It took five years for the New York City Police Department to fire Daniel Pantaleo for the on-camera killing of Eric Garner.

The contrast in statements and actions underscores what’s missing in the conversation about police accountability or the oft-dreaded talk of reform: political will. There can be no police accountability that protects black and brown communities without it. However, like all things, political will begins with the demands of the people. It includes not retaining politicians like de Blasio who run on one thing and fail to deliver. It includes holding elected officials’ feet to the fire when the messaging machine insists on “accountability” measures that do not work. In previous years, outfitting officers with body cameras and anti-bias training used to pass as significant. Today, we know that body cameras do not curb violent behavior by police and often double as low-quality snuff films of those killed by officers. We know that despite sinking millions into anti-bias training, the effectiveness of those trainings is also questionable, though they are dubbed a “best practice.” All of these best practices were implemented in Minneapolis, but we know the best practice to curb police violence is to reduce the number of interactions people have with police.

Political will means pushing elected officials from the moment they declare intentions to run. We need to push candidates not to take money from police unions, and to move candidates away from language centering police reform and toward language of overhaul. There is no reason youth programs, education, mental health services, and affordable housing are consistently on the budget chopping block, while the police defend their bloated budgets. We have all the evidence we need that divesting in policing and investing in community initiatives like violence interruption programs is the way forward. Now we need elected officials with the political will to make it happen.

The under-reaction by the US government to the coronavirus was not inadvertent, a mistake. It was in part the result of a decades-long campaign to degrade the very idea that government can be a useful, essential aspect of our lives, that it can allow us to collectively accomplish tasks far beyond the capacity of any individual. Today, unfortunately, the dominant view in America, held by essentially all Republican leaders and too many Democratic ones, is that the “free market” always delivers better outcomes than the government.

But that’s the self-serving view of those who benefit most in our “winner-take-all” economy. What we need instead is a healthy, regulated balance between civil society, government, and private enterprise. And if we’re smart, we’ll use this current crisis to rebalance the scales in America. The bailouts this time cannot be like the 2008 variety, in which bankers got bonuses and millions of homeowners got screwed. We don’t just need strings attached to this bailout. We need steel cables. The interests of ordinary people must come first. Period.

As everyone should by now be aware, the coronavirus crisis is not just a public health crisis. It’s a jobs and income crisis, a small-business crisis, a child care crisis, a poverty crisis. In a real sense, it is a dress rehearsal for the future. What this crisis plainly demonstrates is the critical importance of investment in the resilience and equity of social and technical systems. It bears repeating: The very idea of government and the public good have been the targets of a decades-long ideological assault. The result? There is absolutely no slack in any of our systems; a shock can disrupt the lives of millions. It should remind every car- or homeowner of what they already know: Preventive maintenance is always worthwhile.

Perhaps the most important lesson of the coronavirus is that if we don’t prepare now, and start thinking about how to stop problems before it’s too late, we’re risking everything we care about: our homes, our jobs, and the health of our loved ones. This is where the virus has something very important to teach us—if we’re willing to learn.

The climate crisis is going to be many, many times worse. It may happen more slowly, but let’s not kid ourselves. Greater disease transmission, food shortages, energy blackouts, floods, homelessness, joblessness, species extinction—each will stagger us and then do so again.

You have to ask yourself, why are our political leaders unwilling to take serious action on climate? They know it will be too late before too long. So what’s going on?

We live in a hyper-capitalist system that rewards and even demands short-term thinking by political and business leaders. Time after time, political and corporate power brokers put their short-term interests ahead of the long-term health and economic security of all. The crude right wing in American life and media (Fox News and others) gaslights America on this topic; they endlessly claim that pro-climate activists are out-of-touch elitists, while they are the true guardians of the (white) working class. The more sophisticated types—the neoliberals who have dominated economic policy for 40 years—hide behind an ideological smokescreen to argue that theirs is the only path, that another world is simply not possible. Fortunately, the Sanders and Warren campaigns stuck a dagger in that enduring lie.

Republicans in the US Senate did not know that a virus was coming. They would no doubt say that had they known, they would not have supported cuts to CDC staffing and research. Still, anyone with an ounce of foresight took the precisely opposite position in favor of continued funding; they know we have a CDC for a reason. The world is complicated. We have to think ahead. Science is the essential tool for doing so.

It goes without saying that we desperately need to change course in order to avert the worst impacts of climate change. Fortunately, what’s needed is not mysterious, but it is hard and is definitely not short-term. We can save our climate by investing in jobs policies that will transform and improve manufacturing, agriculture, electrification, transportation, housing, infrastructure, care work—and virtually every aspect of our economy. The relevant question is whether we do so in a way that will help working-class, middle-class, and poor Americans first, not last. This is how we take responsibility for the world our children and grandchildren will inherit and inhabit.

Those same Senate Republicans have been Trump’s most important line of defense, joining him in his stance against climate change, public health, the public good, and reality. It does not seem an overstatement to assert that these senators are drenched in shame—and will soon have the deaths of thousands of Americans on their consciences. But it won’t suffice to merely replace them with Democrats who strive for “capitalism with a human face.” The virus has only underlined how deeply unequal and immoral our society is, with wealthy people able to ride out the storm much more easily than the rest of us. The desire for unlimited private wealth and power that characterizes America today will overwhelm our ecosystem just as the coronavirus is overwhelming our health care system.

Luckily it’s not too late. We can flatten the curve on climate change too. It starts by altering the balance of power in Washington.

In 1997, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Timmons v. Twin Cities Area New Party, on whether states could ban electoral “fusion,” the voting system that allows two or more parties to nominate the same candidate. Defending the ban, the State of Minnesota argued, without evidence, that the fusion system would confuse voters. Minnesota’s lawyer dodged a question on how New York had used the fusion system for more than a century without any confusion, leading Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to gently mock Minnesota’s lawyer: “New Yorkers are smarter, I think. That’s probably the answer.”

The advocates of fusion voting lost that fight. Conservative Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote the majority opinion, ruling that Minnesota’s interest in a stable two-party system allowed it to limit the associational rights of minor parties and their supporters.

Today, fusion voting is back in the news. The New York State Democratic Party just passed a resolution calling for its elimination, backed by Governor Cuomo’s newly appointed state-party chairman. The resolution does not bring credit to its author: It says nothing about why fusion exists, what its role was historically, or why it was made illegal in most, but not all, states.

Fusion is a response to the winner-take-all electoral system. It solves the “wasted vote” or “spoiler” dilemmas that otherwise plague third parties, and allows citizens who don’t fit neatly into the Democratic or Republican boxes to nevertheless participate constructively in politics.

And it is important to remember that third parties have played a critical role in American history. Many of our strides towards “a more perfect union”—including the abolition of slavery, the eight-hour day, unemployment insurance, women’s suffrage, Social Security, child-labor laws—began as fringe ideas of third-party activists. They told the truth before the major parties wanted to hear it, and their ideas were eventually adopted by those who initially rejected them.

Today, only eight states allow fusion candidacies, but it was once legal in all states. Abraham Lincoln won reelection in 1864 as the candidate of the Republicans and the “War Democrats,” the fraction of the Democratic Party that wanted to pursue the Civil War until the Confederacy was defeated. In 1872, Horace Greeley ran for president as the fusion candidate of the Liberal Republican Party and the Democrats.

But it was the Populists, or People’s Party, that most proved the potency of fusion in giving voice to the marginalized. During the 1880s and 1890s, the Populists mobilized hard-pressed farmers on the Great Plains, out West, and in the Deep South to challenge the “money power” exercised by the Eastern banks, railroads, and farm-machinery manufacturers. Tactically, fusion gave the Populists a way to hold onto their identity and mobilize their supporters, but also to forge majoritarian alliances. Perhaps the most famous of those alliances was with the Knights of Labor, creating a “farmer-worker” alliance that alarmed the capitalist class in several states.

In the Midwest and West, Populists united with Democrats to challenge imperious business Republicans. In the South, Populists sided with egalitarian Republicans against Jim Crow Democrats. This tactical flexibility was joined to visionary policy ambitions. A generation before such measures became law, the Populists called for the secret ballot, the direct election of senators, the graduated income tax, banking regulation, trust busting, and sweeping labor-law reform . They elected governors, members of Congress, state legislators, and thousands of local officials all across the country. In 1896, at the peak of the Populists’ power, William Jennings Bryan ran for president of the United States as the fusion nominee of both the Populist and Democratic parties.

Populist success with fusion politics alarmed the powers-that-be, and when McKinley defeated Bryan, triumphalist Republicans were determined to change the rules in their favor. State by state, they worked to make fusion illegal as a way to prevent the farmer-worker alliance that it made possible. “We can whip them single-handed,” said one legislator during a debate in the Michigan state house, “but don’t intend to fight all creation!” Like vote suppressors of our own era, politicians are well aware that changing the rules of the game is a powerful way to keep control. It took about 20 years, but by World War 1 most states had eliminated fusion voting and, in so doing, weakened the political influence of dissenters.

Fusion voting endured in but a few states, most famously in New York. During the 1930s and ’40s, the American Labor Party, which for a time enjoyed the support of most of the city’s powerful trade-union movement, engaged in fusion campaigns. FDR was happy to win the endorsement of the ALP, as were other candidates who supported New Deal policies. Fiorello LaGuardia won his race for NYC mayor in 1937 with 1.35 million votes, of which 483,000 came on the ALP line.

In the past 20 years, the Working Families Party has emerged as a lively party presence in more than 15 states. In New York, the WFP has converted its electoral muscle into a solid roster of policy gains: the minimum wage, repeal of the Rockefeller Drug Laws, a substantial “millionaire’s tax,” and paid sick leave, to name but a few accomplishments in which it played a leading role. And it has made the right enemies: the real-estate lobby, school privatizers, Wall Street, and the rogue Democrats who flipped control of the state Senate to the Republicans in 2012.

One might reasonably ask why this is happening now, nearly a hundred years after the last spasm of anti-fusion legislation. Last November, the New York WFP and progressive-minded Democrats joined forces to run the electoral table. Fifteen new state Senators, all running as fusion D-WF candidates, swept the Republicans (and their Democratic allies) into well-earned oblivion. New, progressive leadership has emerged in the Senate, and energetic legislators in both legislative chambers are passing laws that corporate lobbyists can no longer bottle up. Some of those frustrated lobbyists, and even some high-ranking Democrats, might prefer to return to the coalition between the Republicans and rogue Democrats. But they can’t, and in their frustration at the rise of progressivism, they are taking aim instead at the visible targets of the fusion system and the Working Families Party.

New Yorkers are no smarter than Minnesotans, but they do have a better voting system. Their legislators ought to think twice before limiting democracy at the behest of powerful economic and political forces.